Charleston

We took a long weekend to go to Charleston to enjoy ourselves before the baby arrives. Here is James looking cute on the famous Rainbow Row.

We visited several historic locations, including the Middleton Place Plantation, which dates back to the 1700's. Here I am sitting on a massive live oak overlooking twin butterfly lakes.
The plantation owners buried many of the garden statues and other valuables to protect them from Northern troops during the Civil War. The gardens around the plantation were amazing!

James makes friends with a rooster on the farm at the plantation.



The trees on the ground are about 800 years old. they were huge!

Here I am at the Aquarium overlooking the bay.

Snow!

The snow this weekend wasn't nearly what the weathermen forecasted, but it was still enough to make things pretty. It snowed almost the entire day on Saturday, and if the ground hadn't been wet, it probably would have accumulated a lot more. Here are a few pictures from Sunday morning before it started melting.

Saturday morning at around 9:00 a.m. - it was coming down pretty good! You might have to zoom in to really appreciate this one.

Horizon Shower

My wonderful co-workers Amy and Cheryl threw James and I a shower at work. Here are some pictures from the party...thanks, everyone for the wonderful gifts!

Crib Assembly

We got the crib this past weekend - it really wasn't as hard to put together as we thought it would be after all the horror stories we heard. We completely forgot about the mattress, though - guess that means another trip to Babies R Us! That store is going to own us. :)

Baby's Room

Here is the furniture we'll order in the next couple of weeks & where we plan to put it in the room.

Putting up the wainscoting

You can see the bottom of the new ceiling fan here. Better pictures below...


Crown moulding up


Daddy getting ready to paint trim

putting down the first pieces of floor

cutting the baseboards

Finished at last!

The bassinet and swing will end up downstairs, but I wanted to have at least something "baby" in there until the furniture comes in.

23 week ultrasounds

23 week Level II ultrasounds from the specialist's office.

They found out from the 20 week scans that he had SUA (Single Umbilical Artery), commonly known as a 2-vessel cord (a normal cord has 3: two arteries and one vein). They wanted to follow up with a Level II ultrasound to check all of his organs, pieces and parts to make sure there were no significant risks.

He checked out fine - completely perfect from head to toe! Praise God!

The only thing they'll watch him for now is to make sure he gets nice and big, 2-vessel cord babies are sometimes small and come early. Let's pray he stays put until he's nice and fat and arrives as close to April 2nd as possible!

You can see a cross section of the cord here just to the lower left of his fist.

The single artery compensates by getting bigger.

This is one of my favorite pictures. It's a close up of his face to check for any signs of a cleft palate.

You can see his lips and nostrils, and both of his arms up like he's rubbing his eyes with his fists. He must have been sleepy - we could watch him yawning during the entire scan.